Grok: "According to estimates from UNESCO and other maritime databases, there are over three million shipwrecks resting underwater worldwide, spanning the entirety of human history. This figure includes vessels lost in oceans, rivers, lakes, and coastal areas due to storms, wars, collisions, and other causes. Only a small fraction—less than 1%—have been explored or documented in detail, with databases like Wrecksite.eu cataloging around 210,000 known wrecks and the Global Maritime Wrecks Database listing over 250,000. The oldest known wrecks date back thousands of years, such as ancient vessels from around 2700-2200 BC."
Note that we are talking about ships (not all sorts of boats): "The UNESCO-derived 3 million+ estimate is generally understood in maritime archaeology to emphasize ships of meaningful size and cultural/historical significance—ancient merchant vessels, Bronze Age traders, Roman galleys, medieval cogs, Age of Sail frigates, steamships, WWII vessels, and modern cargo ships...."
3 million! I picture clutter, but I know that must be wrong. We're talking about 140 million square miles of space down there. If they were evenly spaced out, there would be 6 to 9 miles between them. But we know there are more crowded places — shipping routes, battle sites, and places where the conditions are dangerous.
How much gold is down there in the 3 million wrecks? Grok says it's 400-600 metric tons. There is also gold dissolved in seawater — 20 million tons! — but that's not from the shipwrecks.
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45 కామెంట్లు:
Without cheating, I'm guessing at least 1/2 million.
100,000
I just spent six months in a leaky boat
Lucky just to stay afloat
13,589 total
When I visited the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City (which is due to close this November), I was amazed at the map that showed the number of shipwrecks along the Missouri River. And of course, I visited the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, Michigan, which also had maps showing the number of shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, telling how dangerous it was with all of the chaotic traffic in earlier centuries without the benefits of radio, radar, GPS, etc. Ships were the fastest way to move people and cargo before the days of interstate highways and airports, but you were literally taking your life in your hands taking one of those ships.
I've dove on just eight of them. Sigh. Better get back in the water...
The sea appears endless when you're in the middle of it, and that's just the top of it. A ship might look gigantic when it's next to the pier, like a sideways skyscraper. But at sea it's like being in a wastebasket.
My guess would be a few hundred thousand.
We sometimes take a ferry to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. It's about a 20 minute ride (super expensive). In the little room you can sit in if you want to get out of your car, there's a map of all the shipwrecks in Lake Erie. It's a little disconcerting. (Incidentally, the trip is expensive but worth it, great populations of fox snakes, Lake Erie watersnakes, and interesting salamanders on Kelleys Island.)
I was thinking five maybe six figures--wow!
Steamboats working the Mississippi system in the 19th C were lucky to last five years without collision, grounding, fire, or explosion, often with considerable loss of life. Books like "Disasters on the Western Waters" were top sellers.
https://www.mlive.com/weather/2025/10/terrifying-footage-shows-what-it-would-be-like-on-lake-michigan-in-yesterdays-massive-17-foot-waves.html
I guessed 3 million, 3000 years times 1000 per year considering fewer in the past and more in the recent times. This was a feeble guess and I take no credit for it.
This sounds like one of those old Google interview questions to see if you think like a googler. “Where would you find the greatest concentration of dead bodies in car trunks.” I would guess an airport parking lot.
“ 3 million! I picture clutter”
A lot of those, probably the majority, are gone by now.
When you're planning an offshore oil & gas well, one of the things you do is to take a 'site survey' to make sure the area is safe. You steam over it, back & forth, with a survey vessel on a large area, and capture data in a set of swathes that include your anchor pattern and beyond. You scan below the seabed for shallow gas pockets, and you run sidescan sonar to see if anything is on the seabed, or if there are coral reefs that need to be avoided. Same thing for subsea pipelines and infrastructure.
We've found wrecks many times, fishing boats and what not. Also, anchor scars, abandoned cables, junk.
One time I had a Canadian outfit get in touch, they recover lost WWII war birds and try to recover them, restore them. At the end of WWII as part of the peace agreements, ships would steam along the 100 fathom line and just push the aircraft over the side. Tanks, trucks, munitions too. Since we already had the vessel in the area, we took their estimate of where this had happened, according to the old ship logs, and we ran the sidescan looking for some old British warbirds, but it was a long shot - once in the water there's no telling how they would 'fly' or where they would finally land after gliding down. We found another wrecked fishing boat, but no planes.
The Allies lost a buttload of vessels to the U-boats, in the Caribbean, during WWII. A lot of ore vessels, bringing bauxite to the US for aluminum. A lot of convoys hit, too. We are blessed not to have lived through times like those.
"A lot of those, probably the majority, are gone by now."
My question asks about the existing shipwrecks. If they are gone, they're not there.
They could be seriously degraded or reduced to piles of things. But the question is not how many ships have wrecked but how many shipwrecks are there. Present tense.
They could be under sediment or sand though, so that would reduce the cluttered look. Sort of like when you put your household belongings in cabinets and drawers instead of leaving them strewn about in plain sight. But the stuff is still there. It exists.
the oldest found boat is the 10,000-year-old Pesse canoe, a dugout pine log discovered in the Netherlands.
counts!
All of the shipwrecks still exist, at the atomic level. You seem to be looking for shipwrecks that would be visually identifiable to a diver and thus clutter. The answer there is fully subjective depending on the perspicacity of the observer.
The Irish Sea and part of the Celtic Sea used to have so many shipwrecks the U-boats would hide there, sitting on the bottom. Escort sonor would think they were one of the wrecks. The Royal Navy had to map them all to stop the practice.
I haven't looked yet, but it is a question which requires a great deal of clarification. Currently? That ever existed? That were "wrecked" while in operation, or simply sunk?
After seeing a Soyuz sinking the Yamamoto, not sure I’d trust AI.
The space down there is cubic, not square. It's a lot.
And there are a lot of "wrecks" that are not underwater. Maritime archeologists and historic preservationists frequently hold up construction projects when excavations uncover ancient craft underground.
I never would've guessed 3 million. That's a lot of ships. And wrecks - even wooden ones - last longer than I thought. Per Wiki:
A 100 foot long, Roman ship was discovered off the coast of Greece with its cargo of amphorae still on the seafloor, dating back to 100 BC–100 AD.
@Aggie, what I've heard is since a lot of the WWII aid from the US was *Lend-Lease*, i.e. our allies were technically obligated to pay if they wanted to keep it, it was destroyed to avoid increasing their war debt and because we certainly didn't have use for the stuff.
tcrosse, agree. My wife and I did a trans-Atlantic repositioning cruise on NCL which was, IIRC, at least 5 days of open ocean sailing. About the second or third day I realized I could literally feel the 'thud' as a 150K+ ton ship rolled over the waves.
I'll go with 40,349 ships--and one rowboat.
Well I was off by a rowboat.
I have a better question--what happens to all of those fiberglass boats when they can't sell them to some other sucker and their owners' wives finally make them get them out of the space between the garage and the neighbor's property line? (As near as I can tell they end up on the back 40's of non-waterfront farmland, but that can't account for all of them).
At least one was lost after a 3 hour tour ...
3 million, but only Florence actually built a ship to wreck:
https://youtu.be/FdKYjI1xZ4g?si=Zg-sMxDjgZBWPhh2
CC, JSM
I'm halfway through "The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Seems the biggest factor causing shipwrecks in the Great Lakes was the short distance between waves. The bow could be on the crest of one wave and the stern on the next, with nothing supporting the middle of the ship. With all the ore they were carrying, the boats would just snap in half.
“There is also gold dissolved in seawater — 20 million tons!”
Of perhaps more concern,
“The world's oceans contain an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater.”
Including the ones from the last week or so?
Christopher B: Remember, just because a trip was only supposed to be a three hour tour, that doesn’t mean that once the weather starts getting rough and the tiny ship is tossed, the total elapsed time before it fetches up on land will only be three hours.
I think the point of debate is that the implication of "ship" has drifted upwards over the years. Large wooden vessels became a standard thing by the Bronze Age, even if rowed and unable to navigate the ocean prior to the Vikings (1,000 years ago). While the medieval "cog" trade vessels were nominal ships, they weren't very big. There were many more smaller "boats" such as dugout canoes, and certainly millions of those have sunk.
By today's standards, old time "ships" were similar to modern recreational yachts. If "ship" is adjusted to mean the best water technology of the day, three million seems plausible.
Should the shipwrecks in the Aral Sea count towards the “shipwrecks under water”? They are on land now.
My guess was 1 million as well, at least we were in the right order of magnitude, even if we were way off!
If you count every ship that has ever sailed over every ocean since the time humans ventured out to sea it's well over 3 million.
Total shipwrecks must be over 20,000 just in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Add the East and I'd say over 50,000. I'll take the over.
Huh..... lol.
----- The UNESCO-derived 3 million+ estimate
Oh, so it's actually complete baloney. OK, I took the over, what do I win?
And in some places, there are hardly any:
“ The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 revealed two shipwrecks. During the extensive search efforts in 2015, researchers identified these wrecks, which are believed to be 19th-century merchant vessels carrying coal. One of the wrecks might be the W. Gordon, which went missing in 1877, or the Magdala, lost in 1882. The second wreck is likely the West Ridge, which sank in 1883 while sailing from England to India.
These discoveries were significant as they helped maritime historians understand the mysteries surrounding these lost ships while the primary goal of finding MH370 remained elusive.”
I split the difference between you and the report.
I guessed millions.
Also, this gives me an opportunity to belatedly express my eternal gratitude to Dawn Wells for the memorable moments she provided me in my youth.
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